February 2, 2016 • 44 mins
In World War II, a secret department of British 'corkscrew thinkers' hatched a plan to use the cadaver of an unclaimed homeless man to turn the tide of the war in the Allies' favor. It worked.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, There's Jerry Rowland. This is
Stuff you Should Know. Chuck, I'm thirty nine years old
and I still can't say my own name correctly because
(00:22):
of my stupid thick tongue. You're gonna be forty crazy. Yeah.
I used to make fun of me, and now you're old. Well,
you're still older than me. I know nothing I can
do about that. That's cool though. Yeah you're aging very well. Yeah, no,
you're aging really well. But you mean the teeth falling out,
the weight gain, and they're the gray beard. I still
(00:46):
say you're aging very well. I appreciate it. Let's get here.
Take off your hat. I still got good hair. Boom,
look at that. We got hatead now beautiful. Okay, we'll
think I'm bald. Some people do, like you're always wearing
that hat. Why. I don't know suspicious people. Yeah, like
the drummer for the Chili Peppers, Anthony keytith Flee, Nope,
(01:09):
the guy from Jaan's Addiction, Nope, I don't know them.
Not John Percant chat Smith, the guy that looks like
Will Ferrell, He's always Ferrell. He's always got that hat
on backwards. And um he's baldly like Brett Um Michael's bald.
Remember he always wears a do Rag's super bald. So
I get why people are suspicious. If you're a public
(01:32):
figure that has a patented hat piece, then it's probably
because you're bald, but not in my case. What a
weird way to start the show, especially this show, Operation Mincemeat,
which is a ghoulish gallows humor awesomely World War two
British name for this, this operation. Yeah, this will live
(01:55):
alongside our our Nazi spies and Invading Florida podcast and
the History Girls covered this this very topic as well. Yeah, man,
there's nothing I love more than little known history. This
is this is it. But this is great little known history.
And this shouldn't be middle known because it was after
the Trojan War, maybe the largest and most successful military
(02:17):
deception plan in history. Well, there's also have you seen
that documentary Ghost Army about Operation Fortitude. They used a
bunch of blow up tanks and planes, like inflatable tanks
and planes to make it look like there's a whole
Allied division over here, so that we could invade Normandy
more you it's like a Looney Tune cartoon. Awesome, But yes,
(02:39):
this ranks up there with literally with the Trojan Horses.
It's that ingenious and that wonderful. But so let's set
the stage right. So in early nineteen UM the war
was very much undecided. It could have been anybody's, like your,
Europe was under the control of Hitler, huge amounts of Europe.
(03:00):
They called it Fortress Europe because he the Nazis were
just had just overrun the place, right dug in and um,
the the Allies knew that they needed to get into
Europe to topple Hitler or else, like they weren't going
to win the war. So um Churchill suggested attacking Europe's underbelly,
which is maybe Italy, Greece, Sardinia. He called it the underbelly,
(03:25):
not very flattering, but he called it Europe's underbelly. So everybody,
the Allies, the Greeks, the Nazis, the Japanese, Um, the
people uh in Hawaii. Everybody knew, yeah, they weren't American
quite yet. Everybody knew that the Allies were gonna attack
(03:46):
somewhere in that area. Yeah, come up through the Mediterranean.
Even Hitler feared this the most. But right, and and
I mean everybody knew the Allies were coming and they
were gonna come there. But this, this land mass, this
area land and see is large enough that you can't
just be like, oh, they're coming down there, we got
it covered. You need to know kind of specifically where
(04:08):
they were covering. And there were just a few places
where they could have come. One was Greece, that was
where Hitler always suspected. One was Sardinia, right, and then
another was Sicily. And in ninety three, I think January,
the Allied powers met in French Morocco and held um
a conference, the Casablanca Conference. Yeah, it really was. And
(04:33):
um they said, okay, we're going to invade Sicily this July.
We're gonna call it Operation Husky. Now we have to
do everything we can to not let the Nazis know
that that's where we're going. And that actually hatched eventually
what's called Operation Mincemeat. Yeah, you know what. Studying this
(04:53):
stuff and I'm not a big war buff um, although
I'm getting more so, but reading up on this stuff
like the old war are so much like the board
game risk that it's startling. Yeah, it's literally when you
look at the stuff, it's like moving troops to where
you think people are going to attack you and rolling
the dice a bit, and if you're right, then great,
(05:15):
If not, you're screwed very much though, which is why
it's such a huge shift that we're seeing now in
moving to unconventional warfare, because that's scary stuff. Yeah. I
think pretty much all war is scary. Yeah. Well, of
course I'm not saying like Normandy was a gig walk
or anything, because they knew what they was going on. Man,
I watched Saving Private Ryan again the other day. God,
(05:37):
it's crazy. That thing's almost a snuff film. It's not
as bad as We Were Soldiers, which is a snuff film,
but it's I never saw that one, the Mel Gibson where, Yeah, dude,
it's it's the most graphically violent mainstream movie ever made. Really. Yes, Yeah,
Like there's a part where there's there they have a
shot a camera shot over this guy's shoulder, right, so
(06:01):
his helmets in the in the near four ground and
that guy takes a hit to the head and like
blood spray covers the camera lens for the next like
a little while his brains just cover the camera. It's disgusting.
Did you like Saving Private Again? Yeah, it's it's a
great movie, but it is like really like violent. That's
another thing about getting older is that stuff affects you
(06:23):
more and more. The more you come to terms with
your own mortality, the more valuable life becomes. The more
valuable even a character in a movie's life becomes, you
know what I mean? That stuff gets to agreed, It's
called growing up, my friend, I'm becoming human, isn't it
grows alright? So on September twenty nine, nine nine, Uh,
(06:43):
there was a director of British Naval Intelligence name Admiral
John Godfrey, and he distributed something called the Trout Memo
and um, it was written by his assistant, Lieutenant Commander
Ian Fleming. Familiar name, yeah, creator of James ball Own.
That's right, the guy, And uh, I think most people
know that he served at this point. Yeah, but um,
(07:05):
if you didn't, that's a nice little factoroid for you.
So he he wrote the Trout Memo and they called
it the Trout Memo memo because they pointed out in
the intro that this that the trout fisherman fishes very patiently,
but he changes venue frequently, and he changes his bait
very frequently too, And so they wanted to they're charged
with deception. They wanted to come up with all these
(07:27):
different ideas, all this different bait and venue changes that
they could come up with. Yeah, and this was the
time too. We should point out that um spying, spying
is always vital, but man of World War two, it
was going on all over the place in a huge,
huge part of the war. So, um, we need to
do one on the Enigma machine. By the way, at
(07:48):
some point we do because that's one of the unsung
heroes in this operation. Absolutely. Um. Alright, So with the
trout memo. In Flaming wrote uh Well co authored fifty
one different operations suggestions, and number twenty eight was one
called a suggestion parentheses not a very nice one. The
(08:10):
following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thompson.
I'm so pleased that you said Basil instead of Basil. Uh.
In fact, that was the novel The Milliner's Hat Mystery.
And he was actually a World War One spy. Oh really, yea,
So he was it a spy writer that Ian Fleming,
(08:30):
the creator James Bond, Doug Crazy, So that's where this originally,
so uh here I'm getting that's right. The following suggestion
is used in a book by Basil Thompson Colin. A
corpse dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets
could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute
that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in
(08:50):
obtaining corpses at the Naval hospital, but of course it
would have to be a fresh one. So the idea is,
let's get a dead person, let's dress him up like
a soldier, given some sensitive documents that leak this invasion fraudulent, fraudulent,
very important, that leak the invasion of Greece, which is
(09:11):
not really happening, and they're gonna mount up troops there
and we'll actually go in Sicily. They're gonna find this body.
They're gonna think they've stumbled upon this great happy accident
and we're going to fool him. So yeah, that was
the That was the whole idea, That was the general
basis of it. And Churchill loved the idea because apparently
He liked what he called corkscrew thinkers because he knew
(09:34):
Hitler thought in a straight line. Yes, and by corkscrew thinkers,
I think that would be our equivalent of outside the box. Yeah. Yeah.
Churchill was like, this is great. I love church Let's
drink some scotch and do it. Yeah, let's look like
a bulldog. So um they the well. That idea was
(09:55):
roughly outlined by Ian Fleming, and then the the Churchill's
Court screw Thinkers, the exc committee led by Um you
and Montague and um Chumley. Yeah, which is his name
is not spelled Chumley? How's it spelled? Are you ready
for this? Charles c h O l m O n
(10:19):
d e l e y pronounced Chumley. Yeah, And apparently
when he met people he would say, uh, Lieutenant Charles
Chumley c h O l m O n d e
l e y. He would spell it out, Yeah, Are
you making fun of me? Or is there for no? No No? No.
He was a very quirky guy, and that's how he
described himself as toothpaste, as if it had been squeezed
(10:40):
from the tube. Like he self described. He would go
hunting with a revolver like bird hunting is a weird guy.
I actually watched a quickie BuzzFeed video on this and
they've pronounced it Charles cholmondel Did they really? Yeah, I'm
glad we did our research exactly shout out with the BuzzFeed.
(11:00):
So you and Montague right, yeah, the other guy. He
is noteworthy in a number of ways to apparently it's
just the greatest guy ever, most interesting man on the planet. Um.
And he actually wrote the book, the first book on
Operation mince Meat, because he was one of the people
who came up with this and implemented it. The man
who was never there, the man who never was so too. Yeah,
(11:25):
of the same name starring Montgomery Cliff, I believe, no,
starring Cliff Clay Web. Cliff Claven Cliff Web, but not
Montgomery Clift. Those two are virtually interchangeable there, So um
what you and Montague was already notable because at school
(11:45):
he and his brother had created the rules for um
ping pong I know that, among other things, and his
brother equally interesting equally um rambunctious went on to become
a spy for the Soviets. Wow. Yeah, so he turned
yes against England, Yes against everybody? Except for the Soviets. Well,
(12:08):
Montague was, uh, he was formerly a barrister, an attorney,
and um, this is why he actually did not go
serve on a ship. Um. And the other guy, Chumley,
never flew a plane. One was air Force, one was
a navy. Uh. And apparently Montague was as an attorney,
was very good at just seeing all the angles. So
(12:30):
they said, you, sir, are perfect for this job. And
they picked wisely because these guys really pulled it off.
So we'll dive into this much more in depth right
after this, all right, Chucky, So we have the rough
(12:58):
outline that Ian Fleming came up with the XX Committee,
led by you and Montague and Charles Chumley, the part
of m I five, I believe. Um said we're gonna
take this particular idea and really run with it. Um.
And like you said, they were going to, Well, the
first thing they did was start setting about creating a backstory. Well,
they had three months, so that the clock is ticking
(13:20):
at this point. Yeah, because here's the thing. They set
the invasion right in January, and they set the invasion
for July. Now you needed enough time to um plant
this this corpse, this fake dead courier um that had
ended Nazi hands and give the with enough time so
(13:40):
that the Nazis could digest it, analyze it, decided it
was truthful, and then react the way you wanted them to,
which meant that they had no later than May or
else this plan was out the window. Yeah, you wanted them.
The ultimate goal was to have the Nazis put their
troops in the wrong place, and that takes time, so
they they looked around and they decided that the best
(14:02):
place to carry out this operation was Spain. And Spain
during World War Two was allegedly ostensibly neutral, but they
had a lot of acts as sympathies, a lot of
connections to Nazi Germany. And there was a particular Nazi agent,
a spy working in a port called Um Whoell Whoeverla
(14:26):
Whoeverla right Um, and his name was Adolf Klaus. And
Adolf Klaus was known to be very methodical, pretty brutal,
brutal and ruthless, extremely gullible. Yeah, he was a straight
line thinker. He was hitler. He wasn't one that could
think outside the box and think, maybe this is an
elaborate hoax that that guy didn't even own. A real corkscrew,
(14:48):
you know, like they cut the top to off of
wine bottles. Yeah, they specifically targeted, which is amazing. So
they wanted this guy who was fairly gullible but also
known as like a very respected Nazi agent in Spain
um to be the one who came up with this
corpse and could ever so before they ever had any
(15:09):
corps or could have or anything like that, Montague and
um and Chumley start setting about creating a backstory, and
they created this guy named Major Um Martin, William Martin,
that's right. And they created Major William Martin, and they
created this whole persona and this wasn't the first time
(15:30):
they've done it, that they had actually they had um
chops with this kind of stuff. So they had created
a fake spy network that made Nazi Germany think that
they had a whole double double agent network in the UK.
And all of them were fictitious, not real people that
you and Montague and Charles Chumley had created these fake
(15:54):
personas and had fed the Nazis misinformation through these people
that didn't really exist. So they that that understanding and
that thinking of what it takes to create a fake persona,
and they said about creating one for Major William Martin. Yeah,
and um, if you there's a great BBC documentary on this,
and they interview a lot of the players, um, including
a lot of the women who worked at m I
five in the office, and they were all just so
(16:17):
delighted that they all described this as like the most
exciting adventure they'd ever had. It was like something out
of a spine novel and they were living it. And
so they all had great fun creating these characters that
these made up people. Um. They wanted to give him
a fiance because the idea is that they find this
body with what not only these documents in a briefcase,
(16:40):
the important documents, but to make it believable, he had
to have believable what they called pocket litter or wallet litter,
which is if you find any person on the street,
ask them to open their wallet, you're gonna be able
to tell a lot about them. So just stuff to
legitimize it. So they said, let's give him a fiance,
and all the women in the office wanted to be
the fiance, so they all submitted photographs. They picked this one,
(17:02):
Lady Jean Leslie, uh secretary Okay, that's the lady on
the beach. Yes, picked her of her in a bathing
suit on the beach, so this was going to be
planted on his body. Uh. They all wanted to write
the love letters back and forth, but they picked a
woman named Hester Leggert, the head secretary of m I five,
and she wrote even though she was a spinster, she
(17:23):
wrote all these like heartfelt love letters. The first couple
of drafts were really dirty, and they were like, you
gott to tone this down a little, like, is that
what you think happens in a relationship? No, not me.
So everyone's really excited in the office. Um Chumley is
wearing what would eventually be the uniform of Martin every
(17:43):
day to give it that worn in look. Monta Hue
actually ended up having an affair with the secretary who
gave him the photo as the fiance. They had a
real life affair as Bill and Pam. Pam is the
made up fian say, got they got a little weird
that it is a little weird, Like they wrote each
(18:04):
other love letters, had a real life affair calling each
other Bill and Pam. So there was some like strange
role playing going on. I'm sure, he was married at
the time. His family had been shipped to America, so
he was not doing the right thing there he was
he was allows in that department. Well you know also
um Roll Dahl, the guy who wrote James and Giant
(18:25):
Peach and Charlietor he was a spy for the British.
He was in the British military and his whole job
was to basically bed um the wives of American officials
here in Washington. Really yeah, did he do so? Oh? Yeah? Wow?
Oh he made his way through Washington society apparently with
great zeal. Alright, so they're cooking up this backstory. Uh,
(18:48):
they get other great things for the wallet litter, like, uh,
theater ticket stubs and an overdraft letter from his bank
and just these things that make it seem like super realistic.
And what else they I think they gave him a
st Christopher Metal. Maybe they wanted to strongly imply that
he was Roman Catholic and that will come up, uh
(19:09):
very it will become very important in a minute. Right,
So they've got this backstory and apparently like this, they
were working feverishly on this stuff, having the weirdo affair
wearing the uniform all that stuff before they'd even gotten
final approval, just because they didn't want to stop work
and then had to pick it up feverishly. They wanted
this to to keep going. So they finally got final
(19:31):
approval from Admiral Godfrey um to carry out this thing
for real. And when they got final approval, they said, okay,
we need a body, and they figured no problem they
were looking at first. They needed somebody who um, who
had relatives that didn't care what happened to the body
after death and could keep their mouth shut. Um. They
(19:53):
needed a body that was of military age, didn't have
any signs of visible trauma um right um, and that
that preferably they would have died of pneumonia. And the
reason that they wanted him to die of pneumonia is
because they were going to make it look like this
(20:14):
guy had been in a plane crash, um, but it
survived the plane crash, but it drowned at sea. And
if he had pneumonia, then his fluids would be filled
with long so that when the Spanish conducted in autopsy
on them. Yeah, so that when the Spanish conducted their autopsy,
they'd be like, that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
I've never seen fluid filled with lungs, but that's how
(20:37):
much fluid there is. The problem is is they didn't
get their hands on a guy with pneumonia, and they
didn't even know exactly where to get a person at first.
It wasn't until they turned the guy who ran the
more g at St. Pancras Hospital, which is the worst
hospital name of all time. Um, they turned him and
(20:57):
got him to assist them that they finally got their
hands on body. Yeah. His name was sir uh, Sir
Bentley Purchase, which is a great name, and uh it was.
He was a corner of the largest mortuary at Sat. Pancras,
terrible and he had apparently a wicked sense of humor.
It was pretty complicated to give directions to his office.
So when he gave Montyue the directions, he said, or
(21:18):
he could just get run over by a bus. Nice man.
The British during wartime where they're having their sense of
humor was wonderful. So they got Bentley Purchased and he said,
I've got a dude. Um, his name is Glendor Michael.
Yeah that is not how that's spelled either, No, it
is g l Y n d w R Super Welsh. Yeah,
(21:42):
he was a Welshman born in nineteen o nine. He
was the son of a coal miner. His father killed
himself by stabbing himself in the throat. I hadn't read
that and it didn't say like slit your throat, said
he stabbed himself in the throat, which is weird and at.
So his dad died when he was a teenager. Mother
(22:02):
died when he was thirty. Uh, alcoholic, had a rough
go because of the depression and was basically basically killed
himself by ingesting rat poison. So that is not necessarily
resolved whether it was suicide. Yeah, so they they the
Bentley purchased wrote down that he um he killed himself.
It was ruled a suicide, okay. But the way that
(22:25):
he ate the rat poison, it was on a crust
of bread. He was hungry, they wondered. So he he
may have been so destitute that he ate a crust
of bread that he found in an abandoned warehouse and
it was smeared with rat poison and that's what he
died of. But they found him in this cold January
night in nineteen forty three. Um, in this abandoned warehouse
(22:45):
in London, and um, he had just eaten some rat poison.
But he survived for two more days. And so Bentley
purchased guy, his hands on him and said I think
I found your guy. Dudes, Yeah, and they did. Um.
There were some issues, of one of which is they
needed a photo of the guy for an I d
(23:06):
He didn't have any photos. And every time they took
a picture of the dead guy's face, they were like,
he looks like a dead guy. Yeah, really, So they scoured.
You can see your fingers holding his eyes up. So
they scoured London looking for a look alike and eventually
found a guy at a fellow intelligence officer who looked
just like him. Aweso, they used his face. Aw it's
(23:27):
all coming together, Yes it is. I'm sure they were like, Wow,
Providence is really smiling on this. Yeah. And if you're
feeling bad for Glenn, do or just hang tight? Yeah,
I still think you can feel bad for Glenn or
talk about a rough life. Jeez, do you remember that
one Sara atte Live where Robert Duval was like super
special guest. He wasn't even hosting or mentioned, He just
(23:49):
showed up on this game show called Who's More Grizzled?
And he talks about like it was him and Garth Brooks.
How do I miss that? And um he talks about
how one one cold her his wife died and he
had to keep her out in the barn until the
ground thaws so we can bury her out back. What. Yeah,
(24:09):
it was just weird like that. It wasn't even really funny.
It was more just like, wow, that really is hard.
But the whole game show was Who's more Grizzled anyone?
Of course, because Robert Duvall, Yeah, he's more grizzled than
Garth Brooks even even Yeah, yeah, poor guard from Poor
Garth books. What are you talking about? I'm talking about
(24:30):
the Chris Gaines thing. He chose to do it. He's
a wealthy man. Yeah, I don't feel too bad for him,
but I think that was evidence that he was surrounded
by yes man at the time. That was a weird thing. Though. Yeah,
he faked a soul patch that wasn't even real. No,
I mean, even if it was real, it was part
of his character. It's like I thought you meant it
(24:50):
was Sharpie maybe Okay, the hair was definitely colored with
Sharpie all right, so where where are we here? We've
got a body. We finally got the photograph of him, yeah,
which is that's amazing. I didn't know that part. And um,
there's another thing we found this awesome a military analysis
(25:12):
of it. So that's kind of cool. Somebody wrote a
military analysis of this. I don't remember who, so I
can't come a shout out, but we'll put it on
our podcast page. But they point out that one of
the reasons this was so successful this operation was one
these guys at Excess commit x X committee just had
free run to break the law, um, bend morality, do
(25:34):
all sorts of stuff. Um, they just were able to
go do their thing. But the other thing was is
that they really kept this lid on this stuff and
it was all disseminated on a need to know basis.
So when they had this guy, they had him, they
had they got glend Doer, kept him on ice for
three months as they finished his backstory. They're running up
(25:55):
against like go time, and then I think in um
February or March April maybe I'm not sure the date.
Do you know that what happened when they finally um
carried out Operation mincemeat. Let's just say spring because I
know that they kept him on ice for a few months. Yeah,
and they so they're up to the point where the
(26:17):
d comp is about to give away that this guy
didn't just recently die. Yeah, and that was a big
fear that the Spanish uh corners would be able to
tell to which will come up in a minute, Okay,
and um, they're also getting to the point where they're
reaching the end of the amount of time that they
need to give the Nazis to absorb this MINS information.
So they finally they get the guys persona in place,
(26:40):
they have the body, and now it's time to actually
carry out the operation. And like I was saying, they
kept a lid on all this, so it was a
need to know basis. So they got their hands on
a sub commander who could keep his mouth shut, and
they gave him a metal cylinder um with the corpse
of glendor Michael now Major William Martin. Yeah, when you
say subcommander mean submarine. Yes, not a commander below regular commander,
(27:05):
the submarine commander. They gave him the cylinder and they said,
we're gonna tell you what's in here. Do not tell
anybody else. So apparently the people uh staffing this sub um,
I thought this was some sort of weather buoy. Yeah,
it was marked optical instruments. Um. But you're right. He
was the only one on board supposedly that knew there
was a body inside. Yep, And they put a life
(27:27):
jacket on him, stuffed him in the cylinder, put him
on the sub and took him over to Spain under
a on a submarine. Well, let's back up for one second,
because we we forgot to cover the main letter in
the This was the all of operation mince meat. It
did not hinge on theater ticket stubs or bank overdraft letters.
(27:47):
That's merely pocket litter. It hinged on a letter hinting
strongly that the invasion was gonna come up through Greece Sardinia. Right.
And that was the other thing too. It wasn't like
official document invasion is going to come through Greece. It
was a letter from one general or admiral to another
(28:09):
high ranking guy, I think general Nie. Uh. They composed
a bunch of different letters themselves, and finally they said,
why don't you write it in your own words, in
your own language, in your own handwriting. Everything so it
really was written by this this um high ranking US
military official or British military official, um who who who
(28:30):
wrote this fake letter? And he made a joke about sardines,
a terrible joke, which was the little hint that was
just clever enough to work, right, And so in it
it basically says, um, we're we're coming up with the
you know, we're going to strike through Greece, that's where
the invasion of Europe is going to be. Um, but
we're also going to tell everybody that Sicily is the cover. Right.
(28:55):
And this was a stroke of genius because in this
this false letter, not only does it show that they're
coming through Greece, which they weren't, but it says that
Cecily is the cover, which would make the Nazis think
that if anyone ever did actually leak the real invasion
plan of Sicily, the Nazis would think that that was misinformation. Dude,
(29:16):
it was so ingenious. That's crazy genes. And I think
about here now, Chuck, we get to the point where
we should talk about the Enigma machine and the role
it played, right, Yeah, Well, basically we all know that
the Enigma machine was the codebreaking machine invented in the
UK two decipher. Uh. Well, the Enigma machine wrote the code.
(29:39):
I think, oh it wrote the code, yeah, and then
the decipher code that they had gotten they deciphered it
at Bletchley Park. But I think the Enigma machine was
the actual code writing the encrypting machine. I could be wrong,
but okay, well, so we definitely need to do a
podcast on there because we're mixed up already to get
it straight. But at any rate, the long and short
of it is, and Beckley Park was Beckley Park. I
(30:01):
always say blutch ely was there an Ellen there? I
draw the whole ugly word out. Uh, they basically had
they could. It was like reading the Nazis email essentially
on a daily basis basis, hourly basis. They knew exactly
what was going on, so they would know if they
were buying this whole thing as it happened in real time.
But even before that they were able to craft this
(30:24):
this misinformation based on the Nazis assumptions. So everybody wants
to hear that there are assumptions that their beliefs are correct.
People are more apt to buy that things that confirm
their suspicions of their beliefs already, right, Hitler was worried
about Sicily. He he was, so he he already thought
(30:44):
that Greece was going to be where we invaded. And
then secondly he was he we knew that he had
heard rumors that Mussolini was going to be toppled soon,
so he was reticent to commit troops to Italy Sicily. Right.
So this, this revelation that came in the form of
this letter, this false letter, completely supported everything that Hitler
(31:08):
and the Third Reich believed as far as this European
invasion was going to go. And we're able to do
that thanks to the smarties at Bletchley Park, right yeah,
and uh, this letter too. It's um. There's another little tidbit.
They put a single eyelash in the fold of the
letter so they would know when they eventually got this
letter back. If there was no eyelash, they would know
(31:29):
that the Nazi said in fact opened it. Um And
because the idea was they would open it and reseal
it and act like we never saw it. But there
wasn't that eyelash, and they'd know not so rudim entry.
But it worked. Oh yeah, So, um, did you take
another break. Let's take a break, all right, I'm getting excited. Okay, So, Chuck,
(32:05):
we are at sea aboard a submarine, Jolie down here
and it is and you're not supposed to be smoking cigars.
No you're not, despite Gene Hackman doing it and Crimson tied. Yeah,
what a bad idea. Um. So we're off the coast
of Spain. We're off the coast of whoeverla not an
easy word to say, but it's important Spain. And again
(32:28):
this is where Nazi agent Aidolf Klaus. Yeah, they kind
of want to float the body right up to this
guy's backyard basically, so they did. He was released from
this canister. I I read somewhere else that, um, the
canister itself was fired on with submarine submachine guns on
a sub so you could just call the machine guns there. Um,
(32:49):
And it was sunk and the body drifted off towards
Oh I thought they just dumped the body. Yeah, I'm
not sure, because I found a book, um on Google books.
It was like from two thousand and seven, and it
was a history book and it made it sound like
the sub the people working on the sub all knew
(33:09):
what was going on. But that's in start start contrast
to everything else we've seen. So they may or may
not have sunk the weatherbooy, who knows, but either way,
Major Martin was released into the current that took him
right to Huevla and he went. I think he was
found by a fisherman that same day. Yeah, and at
this point the um the Brits started sending telegrams about
(33:33):
a very important missing person frantic Yeah, like they wanted
these to get intercepted obviously, uh, and that worked as well.
This is all really going exactly as they planned. So
they sent the British Council in Spain in Huevla, um
or in Spain to Huevla and said, you need this
is really important. You need to get your hands on
the briefcase, find out what happened to this guy and
(33:55):
get your hands on his briefcase. And Claus was going
briefcase right as Monocle popped out, and um, the British
Council and Spain didn't even know what was going on.
They thought like this, like they were they saw everything
from the same aspect of reality that the Nazis saw exactly.
So the British Council are trying to get this briefcase
(34:16):
kind of frantically um. And the Spaniards were like, uh,
you know what, we are just going to keep this
on lockdown for now is we investigate the whole thing.
But we got it covered, remember where neutral, so your
briefcase is safe. And the British consul said, well, okay,
one thing this is very important. Uh. This guy was
Roman Catholic. You can check out the medal in his pocket. Um,
(34:40):
so please don't dissect him. It's against Roman Catholic beliefs
and traditions to um dissect or autopsy body. I hadn't
heard before, but apparently in the forties that was the
case and that super Roman Catholic and they said, oh, yes,
of course we won't do that. So apparently that's how
they got around the fact that Glenda her hadn't died
of pneumonia. Uh yeah. And the other way they got
(35:01):
around it was they had a plant uh in the
office who talked to the corners and was like, guys,
it's hot and this body is going to start riding
real soon. So how thorough do you really want to
make this? And they said, you're right, Let's go have
some some wine. Some Uh what do they call it
over there, No, it's the pretty Yeah, let's go have
(35:24):
some sangria and knock off early. And that's exactly what
happened thanks to the plans. Uh, so this is going on.
There was a small wrinkle at this point. The briefcase
went to Madrid, Spain wasn't gonna hand it over to anyone, um,
but the Brits were trying to get it in the
hands of the Nazis. And they're actually having trouble getting
(35:45):
it into the hands of the Nazis until a guy
named Carlo Coolan Tall he was Hitler's most trusted guy
in Spain. Uh, he got wind of it and kind
of took over for Klauss. Was like, I'm gonna get
this briefcase, and he did. Nine days later after the
body washed Ashore. The letter ended up in the hands
(36:05):
of the German. The German, uh you know, it worked
his way up the chain. Yeah, to Hitler himself. Yeah.
I went to Gebel's first, and Gebel's even in his
diary they found later had suspicions about it because he
was a corkscrew thinker, and he was like, wait a minute,
this is pretty convenient Yeah, this is really fishy here,
but he apparently never said anything to Hitler. He got distracted.
(36:29):
He wrote about in his diary, but the documentary said
his thinking was, well, if Hitler believes it, then that's
good enough for me. It seems like bad idea. Yeah,
and um, homeboy Carlo coolintal. There was always a lot
of speculation on why he just ran with it and
didn't ask more questions because that was his job. And
(36:50):
it turns out his grandmother was Jewish and he was
very paranoid about this being found out. So he thought,
this is it. I've come upon the greatest find the
war and it's all mine, so no one will ask
any questions about me after this. Wow, that worked out
really really well. Yeah, very convenient and thanks to the
(37:12):
Enigma machine they knew. Um, the Brits knew pretty quickly
that this was working. And I guess Montague and um
Chumbley were uh sent and Admiral God for you transmission
that said Operation mince Meat swallowed, rod blind and sinker.
Yeah that when when the it's so cool seeing these
old like, uh, apparently you're not supposed to be elderly anymore.
(37:35):
By the way, we got an email. I knew that
or seniors. You're supposed to call them older adults seniors.
I didn't know that that was the thing. Yeah, older adults.
So they're interviewing these older adults, these British ladies that
are in their eighties now, and they were just also
still excited, they said when they because you know, with
the Enigma machine, they were basically reading their emails and
(37:55):
they were like there, they knew they were buying it.
They're buying it, and everyone was just like flipped when
that came through the office. It was just like party
time basically. So the operation meant me really really worked
really well, so much so that apparently Hitler moved a
panzer division which totals about ninety thousand troops from Sicily
(38:19):
to Greece and and all artillery and armaments and everything, Sicily,
We're going to Greece. And then up came the Allies
through Sicily. Hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops storm Sicily
and only seven thousand lives were lost, which is still
in a lot of people who died. But apparently, as
(38:41):
far as military historians are concerned, and I think the
military at the time, that was a way fewer lives
lost than they expected, had they had Hitler not swallowed
Operation minced Me. Yeah, they expected, um, ten thousand casualties
in the first three days and three hundred boats sunk
in the first two days, and it ended up being
(39:01):
four in that first week soldiers and about a dozen
ships in that first week. So that's not bad. Yeah.
And not only that, but it had another effect, big
one the Soviets. Yeah. So this is not something that
they teach in American history classes in US high schools
that much. The the Operation Husky, Uh, well it was.
(39:24):
It was that penetration of Europe's underbelly, right, And suddenly
Hitler said, Um, I'm about to storm Russia, but I
really need these troops down here in Europe because I
got big problems. And that allowed basically Russia to topple
the Nazi regime and Mussolini get toppled by the Brits.
(39:44):
It completely changed the face of the war. This one
idea cooked up by mean Flaming in part that crazy.
It's pretty awesome. You got other stuff. Um, there's a
book called Operation Mincemeat by guy named Brett McIntyre. It
came out in two thousand and ten. That's a very good,
well cited book, um that we inadvertently cited here there. Um.
(40:07):
And then there's The Man Who Never Was, which was
written by you and Montague, which is not just about
Operation mince Meat, but also about basically how to carry
out deception plans. All right, Remember earlier when I said,
don't feel too bad for uh, for Glendor Michael even
he said, well, the dude died possibly of suicide because
(40:28):
he was penniless and going nowhere. He thought about that,
but uh, fifty years after he was buried in uh
the British government added, they basically buried him with military honors.
The Spanish did. Yeah, he's buried in Spain, but the
British it came from the Brits, I think to do so.
(40:48):
His headstone, um came from the bridge, but the Spanish
buried him with like the twenty one gun salute and everything. Yes,
as Glendor Michael served as Major William Martin R M
Royal Marine. Pretty cool. Yeah, So this alcoholic drifter who
never served in the military, ever served in the military,
buried with full military honors. Yeah, and completely changed the
(41:12):
face of the war thanks to being a body yeah,
that the fit the bill, and if you like ghoulish photos,
is a very famous photo of him being propped up
in his life checket and uniform as they were basically
loading him into the cylinder um that you can see
by searching. I'm sure major Charles Martin, that's right, Charles Martin. No,
(41:32):
William Martin, William Martin, something like that. I still want
to know what's going on with that weird role playing
there with that dude. That's a Dylan Pam. Yeah. Yeah,
because they interviewed the lady and she was just like, oh,
it was all very exciting. Yeah, that's a great British
lady accent older person, yeah, older ad older adults, yeah, oldie.
(41:55):
If you want to get or no, if you want
to know more about Operation Mincemeat, just type that word
into your favorite search engine or go check out the
stuff you missed in history class episode And I said
stuff you missed in history class. It's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this bread crust. We had that discussion
about the crust and the in pieces. Remember, so this
(42:19):
is from a dad uh. Dear Chuck and Josh, your
discussion of the in slice of bread and the body
language episode brought ridiculous grin in my face as I
walked around my neighborhood. Ah, don't worry, though, my neighbors
have thought me to be eccentric for years now. Look
at that guy smiling. What a weirdo. We must be
a pinko. When our daughters were still tiny, my wife
(42:40):
and I realized we were doomed to eighteen ish years
of eating bread crust pieces ourselves if we didn't figure
something out in quickly um our solution. We started calling
those pieces the lucky piece, and boy did we look
our innocent, trusting toddlers. Turns out your supposition is correct.
Chuck at least for children under eleven years old, even
(43:01):
if their honor students is mine, where they will fight
you for the right to eat that savory, ohso desirable
piece of luck. Idea younger adults rocking on guys, and
please keep my goofy grinds coming. That is from Ted
c O. I n e with a little uh kin
A coin, A coin I sent to do. No, I
(43:24):
don't know. I didn't take French legom What do you
call that? A lagoon accent? Lagoom? So thanks Ted, I'll
just call you coin yeah quin quin an, I don't know,
let's say coin there. Uh yeah, thanks a lot. Ted.
Ted contacted us on Twitter so he wanted to send
(43:45):
us this email, So there you go, Ted. Wow. Um.
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can try all the ways like Ted did. You can
contact us on Twitter at s Y s K podcast.
You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. You can join us on
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know, and you
can hang out at our luxurious home on the web
stuff you should Know dot com for more on this
(44:11):
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works
dot com
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from house stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark.
There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, There's Jerry Rowland. This is
Stuff you Should Know. Chuck, I'm thirty nine years old
and I still can't say my own name correctly because
(00:22):
of my stupid thick tongue. You're gonna be forty crazy. Yeah.
I used to make fun of me, and now you're old. Well,
you're still older than me. I know nothing I can
do about that. That's cool though. Yeah you're aging very well. Yeah, no,
you're aging really well. But you mean the teeth falling out,
the weight gain, and they're the gray beard. I still
(00:46):
say you're aging very well. I appreciate it. Let's get here.
Take off your hat. I still got good hair. Boom,
look at that. We got hatead now beautiful. Okay, we'll
think I'm bald. Some people do, like you're always wearing
that hat. Why. I don't know suspicious people. Yeah, like
the drummer for the Chili Peppers, Anthony keytith Flee, Nope,
(01:09):
the guy from Jaan's Addiction, Nope, I don't know them.
Not John Percant chat Smith, the guy that looks like
Will Ferrell, He's always Ferrell. He's always got that hat
on backwards. And um he's baldly like Brett Um Michael's bald.
Remember he always wears a do Rag's super bald. So
I get why people are suspicious. If you're a public
(01:32):
figure that has a patented hat piece, then it's probably
because you're bald, but not in my case. What a
weird way to start the show, especially this show, Operation Mincemeat,
which is a ghoulish gallows humor awesomely World War two
British name for this, this operation. Yeah, this will live
(01:55):
alongside our our Nazi spies and Invading Florida podcast and
the History Girls covered this this very topic as well. Yeah, man,
there's nothing I love more than little known history. This
is this is it. But this is great little known history.
And this shouldn't be middle known because it was after
the Trojan War, maybe the largest and most successful military
(02:17):
deception plan in history. Well, there's also have you seen
that documentary Ghost Army about Operation Fortitude. They used a
bunch of blow up tanks and planes, like inflatable tanks
and planes to make it look like there's a whole
Allied division over here, so that we could invade Normandy
more you it's like a Looney Tune cartoon. Awesome, But yes,
(02:39):
this ranks up there with literally with the Trojan Horses.
It's that ingenious and that wonderful. But so let's set
the stage right. So in early nineteen UM the war
was very much undecided. It could have been anybody's, like your,
Europe was under the control of Hitler, huge amounts of Europe.
(03:00):
They called it Fortress Europe because he the Nazis were
just had just overrun the place, right dug in and um,
the the Allies knew that they needed to get into
Europe to topple Hitler or else, like they weren't going
to win the war. So um Churchill suggested attacking Europe's underbelly,
which is maybe Italy, Greece, Sardinia. He called it the underbelly,
(03:25):
not very flattering, but he called it Europe's underbelly. So everybody,
the Allies, the Greeks, the Nazis, the Japanese, Um, the
people uh in Hawaii. Everybody knew, yeah, they weren't American
quite yet. Everybody knew that the Allies were gonna attack
(03:46):
somewhere in that area. Yeah, come up through the Mediterranean.
Even Hitler feared this the most. But right, and and
I mean everybody knew the Allies were coming and they
were gonna come there. But this, this land mass, this
area land and see is large enough that you can't
just be like, oh, they're coming down there, we got
it covered. You need to know kind of specifically where
(04:08):
they were covering. And there were just a few places
where they could have come. One was Greece, that was
where Hitler always suspected. One was Sardinia, right, and then
another was Sicily. And in ninety three, I think January,
the Allied powers met in French Morocco and held um
a conference, the Casablanca Conference. Yeah, it really was. And
(04:33):
um they said, okay, we're going to invade Sicily this July.
We're gonna call it Operation Husky. Now we have to
do everything we can to not let the Nazis know
that that's where we're going. And that actually hatched eventually
what's called Operation Mincemeat. Yeah, you know what. Studying this
(04:53):
stuff and I'm not a big war buff um, although
I'm getting more so, but reading up on this stuff
like the old war are so much like the board
game risk that it's startling. Yeah, it's literally when you
look at the stuff, it's like moving troops to where
you think people are going to attack you and rolling
the dice a bit, and if you're right, then great,
(05:15):
If not, you're screwed very much though, which is why
it's such a huge shift that we're seeing now in
moving to unconventional warfare, because that's scary stuff. Yeah. I
think pretty much all war is scary. Yeah. Well, of
course I'm not saying like Normandy was a gig walk
or anything, because they knew what they was going on. Man,
I watched Saving Private Ryan again the other day. God,
(05:37):
it's crazy. That thing's almost a snuff film. It's not
as bad as We Were Soldiers, which is a snuff film,
but it's I never saw that one, the Mel Gibson where, Yeah, dude,
it's it's the most graphically violent mainstream movie ever made. Really. Yes, Yeah,
Like there's a part where there's there they have a
shot a camera shot over this guy's shoulder, right, so
(06:01):
his helmets in the in the near four ground and
that guy takes a hit to the head and like
blood spray covers the camera lens for the next like
a little while his brains just cover the camera. It's disgusting.
Did you like Saving Private Again? Yeah, it's it's a
great movie, but it is like really like violent. That's
another thing about getting older is that stuff affects you
(06:23):
more and more. The more you come to terms with
your own mortality, the more valuable life becomes. The more
valuable even a character in a movie's life becomes, you
know what I mean? That stuff gets to agreed, It's
called growing up, my friend, I'm becoming human, isn't it
grows alright? So on September twenty nine, nine nine, Uh,
(06:43):
there was a director of British Naval Intelligence name Admiral
John Godfrey, and he distributed something called the Trout Memo
and um, it was written by his assistant, Lieutenant Commander
Ian Fleming. Familiar name, yeah, creator of James ball Own.
That's right, the guy, And uh, I think most people
know that he served at this point. Yeah, but um,
(07:05):
if you didn't, that's a nice little factoroid for you.
So he he wrote the Trout Memo and they called
it the Trout Memo memo because they pointed out in
the intro that this that the trout fisherman fishes very patiently,
but he changes venue frequently, and he changes his bait
very frequently too, And so they wanted to they're charged
with deception. They wanted to come up with all these
(07:27):
different ideas, all this different bait and venue changes that
they could come up with. Yeah, and this was the
time too. We should point out that um spying, spying
is always vital, but man of World War two, it
was going on all over the place in a huge,
huge part of the war. So, um, we need to
do one on the Enigma machine. By the way, at
(07:48):
some point we do because that's one of the unsung
heroes in this operation. Absolutely. Um. Alright, So with the
trout memo. In Flaming wrote uh Well co authored fifty
one different operations suggestions, and number twenty eight was one
called a suggestion parentheses not a very nice one. The
(08:10):
following suggestion is used in a book by Basil Thompson.
I'm so pleased that you said Basil instead of Basil. Uh.
In fact, that was the novel The Milliner's Hat Mystery.
And he was actually a World War One spy. Oh really, yea,
So he was it a spy writer that Ian Fleming,
(08:30):
the creator James Bond, Doug Crazy, So that's where this originally,
so uh here I'm getting that's right. The following suggestion
is used in a book by Basil Thompson Colin. A
corpse dressed as an airman with dispatches in his pockets
could be dropped on the coast, supposedly from a parachute
that had failed. I understand there is no difficulty in
(08:50):
obtaining corpses at the Naval hospital, but of course it
would have to be a fresh one. So the idea is,
let's get a dead person, let's dress him up like
a soldier, given some sensitive documents that leak this invasion fraudulent, fraudulent,
very important, that leak the invasion of Greece, which is
(09:11):
not really happening, and they're gonna mount up troops there
and we'll actually go in Sicily. They're gonna find this body.
They're gonna think they've stumbled upon this great happy accident
and we're going to fool him. So yeah, that was
the That was the whole idea, That was the general
basis of it. And Churchill loved the idea because apparently
He liked what he called corkscrew thinkers because he knew
(09:34):
Hitler thought in a straight line. Yes, and by corkscrew thinkers,
I think that would be our equivalent of outside the box. Yeah. Yeah.
Churchill was like, this is great. I love church Let's
drink some scotch and do it. Yeah, let's look like
a bulldog. So um they the well. That idea was
(09:55):
roughly outlined by Ian Fleming, and then the the Churchill's
Court screw Thinkers, the exc committee led by Um you
and Montague and um Chumley. Yeah, which is his name
is not spelled Chumley? How's it spelled? Are you ready
for this? Charles c h O l m O n
(10:19):
d e l e y pronounced Chumley. Yeah, And apparently
when he met people he would say, uh, Lieutenant Charles
Chumley c h O l m O n d e
l e y. He would spell it out, Yeah, Are
you making fun of me? Or is there for no? No No? No.
He was a very quirky guy, and that's how he
described himself as toothpaste, as if it had been squeezed
(10:40):
from the tube. Like he self described. He would go
hunting with a revolver like bird hunting is a weird guy.
I actually watched a quickie BuzzFeed video on this and
they've pronounced it Charles cholmondel Did they really? Yeah, I'm
glad we did our research exactly shout out with the BuzzFeed.
(11:00):
So you and Montague right, yeah, the other guy. He
is noteworthy in a number of ways to apparently it's
just the greatest guy ever, most interesting man on the planet. Um.
And he actually wrote the book, the first book on
Operation mince Meat, because he was one of the people
who came up with this and implemented it. The man
who was never there, the man who never was so too. Yeah,
(11:25):
of the same name starring Montgomery Cliff, I believe, no,
starring Cliff Clay Web. Cliff Claven Cliff Web, but not
Montgomery Clift. Those two are virtually interchangeable there, So um
what you and Montague was already notable because at school
(11:45):
he and his brother had created the rules for um
ping pong I know that, among other things, and his
brother equally interesting equally um rambunctious went on to become
a spy for the Soviets. Wow. Yeah, so he turned
yes against England, Yes against everybody? Except for the Soviets. Well,
(12:08):
Montague was, uh, he was formerly a barrister, an attorney,
and um, this is why he actually did not go
serve on a ship. Um. And the other guy, Chumley,
never flew a plane. One was air Force, one was
a navy. Uh. And apparently Montague was as an attorney,
was very good at just seeing all the angles. So
(12:30):
they said, you, sir, are perfect for this job. And
they picked wisely because these guys really pulled it off.
So we'll dive into this much more in depth right
after this, all right, Chucky, So we have the rough
(12:58):
outline that Ian Fleming came up with the XX Committee,
led by you and Montague and Charles Chumley, the part
of m I five, I believe. Um said we're gonna
take this particular idea and really run with it. Um.
And like you said, they were going to, Well, the
first thing they did was start setting about creating a backstory. Well,
they had three months, so that the clock is ticking
(13:20):
at this point. Yeah, because here's the thing. They set
the invasion right in January, and they set the invasion
for July. Now you needed enough time to um plant
this this corpse, this fake dead courier um that had
ended Nazi hands and give the with enough time so
(13:40):
that the Nazis could digest it, analyze it, decided it
was truthful, and then react the way you wanted them to,
which meant that they had no later than May or
else this plan was out the window. Yeah, you wanted them.
The ultimate goal was to have the Nazis put their
troops in the wrong place, and that takes time, so
they they looked around and they decided that the best
(14:02):
place to carry out this operation was Spain. And Spain
during World War Two was allegedly ostensibly neutral, but they
had a lot of acts as sympathies, a lot of
connections to Nazi Germany. And there was a particular Nazi agent,
a spy working in a port called Um Whoell Whoeverla
(14:26):
Whoeverla right Um, and his name was Adolf Klaus. And
Adolf Klaus was known to be very methodical, pretty brutal,
brutal and ruthless, extremely gullible. Yeah, he was a straight
line thinker. He was hitler. He wasn't one that could
think outside the box and think, maybe this is an
elaborate hoax that that guy didn't even own. A real corkscrew,
(14:48):
you know, like they cut the top to off of
wine bottles. Yeah, they specifically targeted, which is amazing. So
they wanted this guy who was fairly gullible but also
known as like a very respected Nazi agent in Spain
um to be the one who came up with this
corpse and could ever so before they ever had any
(15:09):
corps or could have or anything like that, Montague and
um and Chumley start setting about creating a backstory, and
they created this guy named Major Um Martin, William Martin,
that's right. And they created Major William Martin, and they
created this whole persona and this wasn't the first time
(15:30):
they've done it, that they had actually they had um
chops with this kind of stuff. So they had created
a fake spy network that made Nazi Germany think that
they had a whole double double agent network in the UK.
And all of them were fictitious, not real people that
you and Montague and Charles Chumley had created these fake
(15:54):
personas and had fed the Nazis misinformation through these people
that didn't really exist. So they that that understanding and
that thinking of what it takes to create a fake persona,
and they said about creating one for Major William Martin. Yeah,
and um, if you there's a great BBC documentary on this,
and they interview a lot of the players, um, including
a lot of the women who worked at m I
five in the office, and they were all just so
(16:17):
delighted that they all described this as like the most
exciting adventure they'd ever had. It was like something out
of a spine novel and they were living it. And
so they all had great fun creating these characters that
these made up people. Um. They wanted to give him
a fiance because the idea is that they find this
body with what not only these documents in a briefcase,
(16:40):
the important documents, but to make it believable, he had
to have believable what they called pocket litter or wallet litter,
which is if you find any person on the street,
ask them to open their wallet, you're gonna be able
to tell a lot about them. So just stuff to
legitimize it. So they said, let's give him a fiance,
and all the women in the office wanted to be
the fiance, so they all submitted photographs. They picked this one,
(17:02):
Lady Jean Leslie, uh secretary Okay, that's the lady on
the beach. Yes, picked her of her in a bathing
suit on the beach, so this was going to be
planted on his body. Uh. They all wanted to write
the love letters back and forth, but they picked a
woman named Hester Leggert, the head secretary of m I five,
and she wrote even though she was a spinster, she
(17:23):
wrote all these like heartfelt love letters. The first couple
of drafts were really dirty, and they were like, you
gott to tone this down a little, like, is that
what you think happens in a relationship? No, not me.
So everyone's really excited in the office. Um Chumley is
wearing what would eventually be the uniform of Martin every
(17:43):
day to give it that worn in look. Monta Hue
actually ended up having an affair with the secretary who
gave him the photo as the fiance. They had a
real life affair as Bill and Pam. Pam is the
made up fian say, got they got a little weird
that it is a little weird, Like they wrote each
(18:04):
other love letters, had a real life affair calling each
other Bill and Pam. So there was some like strange
role playing going on. I'm sure, he was married at
the time. His family had been shipped to America, so
he was not doing the right thing there he was
he was allows in that department. Well you know also
um Roll Dahl, the guy who wrote James and Giant
(18:25):
Peach and Charlietor he was a spy for the British.
He was in the British military and his whole job
was to basically bed um the wives of American officials
here in Washington. Really yeah, did he do so? Oh? Yeah? Wow?
Oh he made his way through Washington society apparently with
great zeal. Alright, so they're cooking up this backstory. Uh,
(18:48):
they get other great things for the wallet litter, like, uh,
theater ticket stubs and an overdraft letter from his bank
and just these things that make it seem like super realistic.
And what else they I think they gave him a
st Christopher Metal. Maybe they wanted to strongly imply that
he was Roman Catholic and that will come up, uh
(19:09):
very it will become very important in a minute. Right,
So they've got this backstory and apparently like this, they
were working feverishly on this stuff, having the weirdo affair
wearing the uniform all that stuff before they'd even gotten
final approval, just because they didn't want to stop work
and then had to pick it up feverishly. They wanted
this to to keep going. So they finally got final
(19:31):
approval from Admiral Godfrey um to carry out this thing
for real. And when they got final approval, they said, okay,
we need a body, and they figured no problem they
were looking at first. They needed somebody who um, who
had relatives that didn't care what happened to the body
after death and could keep their mouth shut. Um. They
(19:53):
needed a body that was of military age, didn't have
any signs of visible trauma um right um, and that
that preferably they would have died of pneumonia. And the
reason that they wanted him to die of pneumonia is
because they were going to make it look like this
(20:14):
guy had been in a plane crash, um, but it
survived the plane crash, but it drowned at sea. And
if he had pneumonia, then his fluids would be filled
with long so that when the Spanish conducted in autopsy
on them. Yeah, so that when the Spanish conducted their autopsy,
they'd be like, that's the most amazing thing I've ever seen.
I've never seen fluid filled with lungs, but that's how
(20:37):
much fluid there is. The problem is is they didn't
get their hands on a guy with pneumonia, and they
didn't even know exactly where to get a person at first.
It wasn't until they turned the guy who ran the
more g at St. Pancras Hospital, which is the worst
hospital name of all time. Um, they turned him and
(20:57):
got him to assist them that they finally got their
hands on body. Yeah. His name was sir uh, Sir
Bentley Purchase, which is a great name, and uh it was.
He was a corner of the largest mortuary at Sat. Pancras,
terrible and he had apparently a wicked sense of humor.
It was pretty complicated to give directions to his office.
So when he gave Montyue the directions, he said, or
(21:18):
he could just get run over by a bus. Nice man.
The British during wartime where they're having their sense of
humor was wonderful. So they got Bentley Purchased and he said,
I've got a dude. Um, his name is Glendor Michael.
Yeah that is not how that's spelled either, No, it
is g l Y n d w R Super Welsh. Yeah,
(21:42):
he was a Welshman born in nineteen o nine. He
was the son of a coal miner. His father killed
himself by stabbing himself in the throat. I hadn't read
that and it didn't say like slit your throat, said
he stabbed himself in the throat, which is weird and at.
So his dad died when he was a teenager. Mother
(22:02):
died when he was thirty. Uh, alcoholic, had a rough
go because of the depression and was basically basically killed
himself by ingesting rat poison. So that is not necessarily
resolved whether it was suicide. Yeah, so they they the
Bentley purchased wrote down that he um he killed himself.
It was ruled a suicide, okay. But the way that
(22:25):
he ate the rat poison, it was on a crust
of bread. He was hungry, they wondered. So he he
may have been so destitute that he ate a crust
of bread that he found in an abandoned warehouse and
it was smeared with rat poison and that's what he
died of. But they found him in this cold January
night in nineteen forty three. Um, in this abandoned warehouse
(22:45):
in London, and um, he had just eaten some rat poison.
But he survived for two more days. And so Bentley
purchased guy, his hands on him and said I think
I found your guy. Dudes, Yeah, and they did. Um.
There were some issues, of one of which is they
needed a photo of the guy for an I d
(23:06):
He didn't have any photos. And every time they took
a picture of the dead guy's face, they were like,
he looks like a dead guy. Yeah, really, So they scoured.
You can see your fingers holding his eyes up. So
they scoured London looking for a look alike and eventually
found a guy at a fellow intelligence officer who looked
just like him. Aweso, they used his face. Aw it's
(23:27):
all coming together, Yes it is. I'm sure they were like, Wow,
Providence is really smiling on this. Yeah. And if you're
feeling bad for Glenn, do or just hang tight? Yeah,
I still think you can feel bad for Glenn or
talk about a rough life. Jeez, do you remember that
one Sara atte Live where Robert Duval was like super
special guest. He wasn't even hosting or mentioned, He just
(23:49):
showed up on this game show called Who's More Grizzled?
And he talks about like it was him and Garth Brooks.
How do I miss that? And um he talks about
how one one cold her his wife died and he
had to keep her out in the barn until the
ground thaws so we can bury her out back. What. Yeah,
(24:09):
it was just weird like that. It wasn't even really funny.
It was more just like, wow, that really is hard.
But the whole game show was Who's more Grizzled anyone?
Of course, because Robert Duvall, Yeah, he's more grizzled than
Garth Brooks even even Yeah, yeah, poor guard from Poor
Garth books. What are you talking about? I'm talking about
(24:30):
the Chris Gaines thing. He chose to do it. He's
a wealthy man. Yeah, I don't feel too bad for him,
but I think that was evidence that he was surrounded
by yes man at the time. That was a weird thing. Though. Yeah,
he faked a soul patch that wasn't even real. No,
I mean, even if it was real, it was part
of his character. It's like I thought you meant it
(24:50):
was Sharpie maybe Okay, the hair was definitely colored with
Sharpie all right, so where where are we here? We've
got a body. We finally got the photograph of him, yeah,
which is that's amazing. I didn't know that part. And um,
there's another thing we found this awesome a military analysis
(25:12):
of it. So that's kind of cool. Somebody wrote a
military analysis of this. I don't remember who, so I
can't come a shout out, but we'll put it on
our podcast page. But they point out that one of
the reasons this was so successful this operation was one
these guys at Excess commit x X committee just had
free run to break the law, um, bend morality, do
(25:34):
all sorts of stuff. Um, they just were able to
go do their thing. But the other thing was is
that they really kept this lid on this stuff and
it was all disseminated on a need to know basis.
So when they had this guy, they had him, they
had they got glend Doer, kept him on ice for
three months as they finished his backstory. They're running up
(25:55):
against like go time, and then I think in um
February or March April maybe I'm not sure the date.
Do you know that what happened when they finally um
carried out Operation mincemeat. Let's just say spring because I
know that they kept him on ice for a few months. Yeah,
and they so they're up to the point where the
(26:17):
d comp is about to give away that this guy
didn't just recently die. Yeah, and that was a big
fear that the Spanish uh corners would be able to
tell to which will come up in a minute, Okay,
and um, they're also getting to the point where they're
reaching the end of the amount of time that they
need to give the Nazis to absorb this MINS information.
So they finally they get the guys persona in place,
(26:40):
they have the body, and now it's time to actually
carry out the operation. And like I was saying, they
kept a lid on all this, so it was a
need to know basis. So they got their hands on
a sub commander who could keep his mouth shut, and
they gave him a metal cylinder um with the corpse
of glendor Michael now Major William Martin. Yeah, when you
say subcommander mean submarine. Yes, not a commander below regular commander,
(27:05):
the submarine commander. They gave him the cylinder and they said,
we're gonna tell you what's in here. Do not tell
anybody else. So apparently the people uh staffing this sub um,
I thought this was some sort of weather buoy. Yeah,
it was marked optical instruments. Um. But you're right. He
was the only one on board supposedly that knew there
was a body inside. Yep, And they put a life
(27:27):
jacket on him, stuffed him in the cylinder, put him
on the sub and took him over to Spain under
a on a submarine. Well, let's back up for one second,
because we we forgot to cover the main letter in
the This was the all of operation mince meat. It
did not hinge on theater ticket stubs or bank overdraft letters.
(27:47):
That's merely pocket litter. It hinged on a letter hinting
strongly that the invasion was gonna come up through Greece Sardinia. Right.
And that was the other thing too. It wasn't like
official document invasion is going to come through Greece. It
was a letter from one general or admiral to another
(28:09):
high ranking guy, I think general Nie. Uh. They composed
a bunch of different letters themselves, and finally they said,
why don't you write it in your own words, in
your own language, in your own handwriting. Everything so it
really was written by this this um high ranking US
military official or British military official, um who who who
(28:30):
wrote this fake letter? And he made a joke about sardines,
a terrible joke, which was the little hint that was
just clever enough to work, right, And so in it
it basically says, um, we're we're coming up with the
you know, we're going to strike through Greece, that's where
the invasion of Europe is going to be. Um, but
we're also going to tell everybody that Sicily is the cover. Right.
(28:55):
And this was a stroke of genius because in this
this false letter, not only does it show that they're
coming through Greece, which they weren't, but it says that
Cecily is the cover, which would make the Nazis think
that if anyone ever did actually leak the real invasion
plan of Sicily, the Nazis would think that that was misinformation. Dude,
(29:16):
it was so ingenious. That's crazy genes. And I think
about here now, Chuck, we get to the point where
we should talk about the Enigma machine and the role
it played, right, Yeah, Well, basically we all know that
the Enigma machine was the codebreaking machine invented in the
UK two decipher. Uh. Well, the Enigma machine wrote the code.
(29:39):
I think, oh it wrote the code, yeah, and then
the decipher code that they had gotten they deciphered it
at Bletchley Park. But I think the Enigma machine was
the actual code writing the encrypting machine. I could be wrong,
but okay, well, so we definitely need to do a
podcast on there because we're mixed up already to get
it straight. But at any rate, the long and short
of it is, and Beckley Park was Beckley Park. I
(30:01):
always say blutch ely was there an Ellen there? I
draw the whole ugly word out. Uh, they basically had
they could. It was like reading the Nazis email essentially
on a daily basis basis, hourly basis. They knew exactly
what was going on, so they would know if they
were buying this whole thing as it happened in real time.
But even before that they were able to craft this
(30:24):
this misinformation based on the Nazis assumptions. So everybody wants
to hear that there are assumptions that their beliefs are correct.
People are more apt to buy that things that confirm
their suspicions of their beliefs already, right, Hitler was worried
about Sicily. He he was, so he he already thought
(30:44):
that Greece was going to be where we invaded. And
then secondly he was he we knew that he had
heard rumors that Mussolini was going to be toppled soon,
so he was reticent to commit troops to Italy Sicily. Right.
So this, this revelation that came in the form of
this letter, this false letter, completely supported everything that Hitler
(31:08):
and the Third Reich believed as far as this European
invasion was going to go. And we're able to do
that thanks to the smarties at Bletchley Park, right yeah,
and uh, this letter too. It's um. There's another little tidbit.
They put a single eyelash in the fold of the
letter so they would know when they eventually got this
letter back. If there was no eyelash, they would know
(31:29):
that the Nazi said in fact opened it. Um And
because the idea was they would open it and reseal
it and act like we never saw it. But there
wasn't that eyelash, and they'd know not so rudim entry.
But it worked. Oh yeah, So, um, did you take
another break. Let's take a break, all right, I'm getting excited. Okay, So, Chuck,
(32:05):
we are at sea aboard a submarine, Jolie down here
and it is and you're not supposed to be smoking cigars.
No you're not, despite Gene Hackman doing it and Crimson tied. Yeah,
what a bad idea. Um. So we're off the coast
of Spain. We're off the coast of whoeverla not an
easy word to say, but it's important Spain. And again
(32:28):
this is where Nazi agent Aidolf Klaus. Yeah, they kind
of want to float the body right up to this
guy's backyard basically, so they did. He was released from
this canister. I I read somewhere else that, um, the
canister itself was fired on with submarine submachine guns on
a sub so you could just call the machine guns there. Um,
(32:49):
And it was sunk and the body drifted off towards
Oh I thought they just dumped the body. Yeah, I'm
not sure, because I found a book, um on Google books.
It was like from two thousand and seven, and it
was a history book and it made it sound like
the sub the people working on the sub all knew
(33:09):
what was going on. But that's in start start contrast
to everything else we've seen. So they may or may
not have sunk the weatherbooy, who knows, but either way,
Major Martin was released into the current that took him
right to Huevla and he went. I think he was
found by a fisherman that same day. Yeah, and at
this point the um the Brits started sending telegrams about
(33:33):
a very important missing person frantic Yeah, like they wanted
these to get intercepted obviously, uh, and that worked as well.
This is all really going exactly as they planned. So
they sent the British Council in Spain in Huevla, um
or in Spain to Huevla and said, you need this
is really important. You need to get your hands on
the briefcase, find out what happened to this guy and
(33:55):
get your hands on his briefcase. And Claus was going
briefcase right as Monocle popped out, and um, the British
Council and Spain didn't even know what was going on.
They thought like this, like they were they saw everything
from the same aspect of reality that the Nazis saw exactly.
So the British Council are trying to get this briefcase
(34:16):
kind of frantically um. And the Spaniards were like, uh,
you know what, we are just going to keep this
on lockdown for now is we investigate the whole thing.
But we got it covered, remember where neutral, so your
briefcase is safe. And the British consul said, well, okay,
one thing this is very important. Uh. This guy was
Roman Catholic. You can check out the medal in his pocket. Um,
(34:40):
so please don't dissect him. It's against Roman Catholic beliefs
and traditions to um dissect or autopsy body. I hadn't
heard before, but apparently in the forties that was the
case and that super Roman Catholic and they said, oh, yes,
of course we won't do that. So apparently that's how
they got around the fact that Glenda her hadn't died
of pneumonia. Uh yeah. And the other way they got
(35:01):
around it was they had a plant uh in the
office who talked to the corners and was like, guys,
it's hot and this body is going to start riding
real soon. So how thorough do you really want to
make this? And they said, you're right, Let's go have
some some wine. Some Uh what do they call it
over there, No, it's the pretty Yeah, let's go have
(35:24):
some sangria and knock off early. And that's exactly what
happened thanks to the plans. Uh, so this is going on.
There was a small wrinkle at this point. The briefcase
went to Madrid, Spain wasn't gonna hand it over to anyone, um,
but the Brits were trying to get it in the
hands of the Nazis. And they're actually having trouble getting
(35:45):
it into the hands of the Nazis until a guy
named Carlo Coolan Tall he was Hitler's most trusted guy
in Spain. Uh, he got wind of it and kind
of took over for Klauss. Was like, I'm gonna get
this briefcase, and he did. Nine days later after the
body washed Ashore. The letter ended up in the hands
(36:05):
of the German. The German, uh you know, it worked
his way up the chain. Yeah, to Hitler himself. Yeah.
I went to Gebel's first, and Gebel's even in his
diary they found later had suspicions about it because he
was a corkscrew thinker, and he was like, wait a minute,
this is pretty convenient Yeah, this is really fishy here,
but he apparently never said anything to Hitler. He got distracted.
(36:29):
He wrote about in his diary, but the documentary said
his thinking was, well, if Hitler believes it, then that's
good enough for me. It seems like bad idea. Yeah,
and um, homeboy Carlo coolintal. There was always a lot
of speculation on why he just ran with it and
didn't ask more questions because that was his job. And
(36:50):
it turns out his grandmother was Jewish and he was
very paranoid about this being found out. So he thought,
this is it. I've come upon the greatest find the
war and it's all mine, so no one will ask
any questions about me after this. Wow, that worked out
really really well. Yeah, very convenient and thanks to the
(37:12):
Enigma machine they knew. Um, the Brits knew pretty quickly
that this was working. And I guess Montague and um
Chumbley were uh sent and Admiral God for you transmission
that said Operation mince Meat swallowed, rod blind and sinker.
Yeah that when when the it's so cool seeing these
old like, uh, apparently you're not supposed to be elderly anymore.
(37:35):
By the way, we got an email. I knew that
or seniors. You're supposed to call them older adults seniors.
I didn't know that that was the thing. Yeah, older adults.
So they're interviewing these older adults, these British ladies that
are in their eighties now, and they were just also
still excited, they said when they because you know, with
the Enigma machine, they were basically reading their emails and
(37:55):
they were like there, they knew they were buying it.
They're buying it, and everyone was just like flipped when
that came through the office. It was just like party
time basically. So the operation meant me really really worked
really well, so much so that apparently Hitler moved a
panzer division which totals about ninety thousand troops from Sicily
(38:19):
to Greece and and all artillery and armaments and everything, Sicily,
We're going to Greece. And then up came the Allies
through Sicily. Hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops storm Sicily
and only seven thousand lives were lost, which is still
in a lot of people who died. But apparently, as
(38:41):
far as military historians are concerned, and I think the
military at the time, that was a way fewer lives
lost than they expected, had they had Hitler not swallowed
Operation minced Me. Yeah, they expected, um, ten thousand casualties
in the first three days and three hundred boats sunk
in the first two days, and it ended up being
(39:01):
four in that first week soldiers and about a dozen
ships in that first week. So that's not bad. Yeah.
And not only that, but it had another effect, big
one the Soviets. Yeah. So this is not something that
they teach in American history classes in US high schools
that much. The the Operation Husky, Uh, well it was.
(39:24):
It was that penetration of Europe's underbelly, right, And suddenly
Hitler said, Um, I'm about to storm Russia, but I
really need these troops down here in Europe because I
got big problems. And that allowed basically Russia to topple
the Nazi regime and Mussolini get toppled by the Brits.
(39:44):
It completely changed the face of the war. This one
idea cooked up by mean Flaming in part that crazy.
It's pretty awesome. You got other stuff. Um, there's a
book called Operation Mincemeat by guy named Brett McIntyre. It
came out in two thousand and ten. That's a very good,
well cited book, um that we inadvertently cited here there. Um.
(40:07):
And then there's The Man Who Never Was, which was
written by you and Montague, which is not just about
Operation mince Meat, but also about basically how to carry
out deception plans. All right, Remember earlier when I said,
don't feel too bad for uh, for Glendor Michael even
he said, well, the dude died possibly of suicide because
(40:28):
he was penniless and going nowhere. He thought about that,
but uh, fifty years after he was buried in uh
the British government added, they basically buried him with military honors.
The Spanish did. Yeah, he's buried in Spain, but the
British it came from the Brits, I think to do so.
(40:48):
His headstone, um came from the bridge, but the Spanish
buried him with like the twenty one gun salute and everything. Yes,
as Glendor Michael served as Major William Martin R M
Royal Marine. Pretty cool. Yeah, So this alcoholic drifter who
never served in the military, ever served in the military,
buried with full military honors. Yeah, and completely changed the
(41:12):
face of the war thanks to being a body yeah,
that the fit the bill, and if you like ghoulish photos,
is a very famous photo of him being propped up
in his life checket and uniform as they were basically
loading him into the cylinder um that you can see
by searching. I'm sure major Charles Martin, that's right, Charles Martin. No,
(41:32):
William Martin, William Martin, something like that. I still want
to know what's going on with that weird role playing
there with that dude. That's a Dylan Pam. Yeah. Yeah,
because they interviewed the lady and she was just like, oh,
it was all very exciting. Yeah, that's a great British
lady accent older person, yeah, older ad older adults, yeah, oldie.
(41:55):
If you want to get or no, if you want
to know more about Operation Mincemeat, just type that word
into your favorite search engine or go check out the
stuff you missed in history class episode And I said
stuff you missed in history class. It's time for listener mail.
I'm gonna call this bread crust. We had that discussion
about the crust and the in pieces. Remember, so this
(42:19):
is from a dad uh. Dear Chuck and Josh, your
discussion of the in slice of bread and the body
language episode brought ridiculous grin in my face as I
walked around my neighborhood. Ah, don't worry, though, my neighbors
have thought me to be eccentric for years now. Look
at that guy smiling. What a weirdo. We must be
a pinko. When our daughters were still tiny, my wife
(42:40):
and I realized we were doomed to eighteen ish years
of eating bread crust pieces ourselves if we didn't figure
something out in quickly um our solution. We started calling
those pieces the lucky piece, and boy did we look
our innocent, trusting toddlers. Turns out your supposition is correct.
Chuck at least for children under eleven years old, even
(43:01):
if their honor students is mine, where they will fight
you for the right to eat that savory, ohso desirable
piece of luck. Idea younger adults rocking on guys, and
please keep my goofy grinds coming. That is from Ted
c O. I n e with a little uh kin
A coin, A coin I sent to do. No, I
(43:24):
don't know. I didn't take French legom What do you
call that? A lagoon accent? Lagoom? So thanks Ted, I'll
just call you coin yeah quin quin an, I don't know,
let's say coin there. Uh yeah, thanks a lot. Ted.
Ted contacted us on Twitter so he wanted to send
(43:45):
us this email, So there you go, Ted. Wow. Um.
If you want to get in touch with us, you
can try all the ways like Ted did. You can
contact us on Twitter at s Y s K podcast.
You can send us an email to stuff Podcast at
how stuff works dot com. You can join us on
Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know, and you
can hang out at our luxurious home on the web
stuff you should Know dot com for more on this
(44:11):
and thousands of other topics because it how stuff works
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